The princess diaries: Rapper Raja Kumari's musical journey

What is the one precaution someone as fierce as hip-hop artiste Raja Kumari takes on social media? “I have to block my mom for the day if I want to do something crazy. That’s the only thing I’m worried about right now,” she says with a laugh. The Los Angeles-bred, currently Mumbai-based singer and rapper says her mother is quite tech-savvy now, and as they live oceans apart, she does allow her to see all her Snaps, Instagram stories and posts.

In less than two year since the release of her debut EP The Come Up, Raja Kumari (Svetha Rao to some, and simply RK to folks in the music industry) has been almost peerless in her manner and matter when it comes to music. She took her lessons in rhythm and beats from classical dance forms and used them to make hip-hop beats and wrote lyrics over them. Her collaboration with Mumbai rapper Divine, ‘City Slums’, sits at over six million views on YouTube.

Raja Kumari has pretty much parachuted into the Indian hip-hop scene, teamed up with the best in the business — be it brands or artistes — and continues to be a regular on the circuit.

The power of hype

Her latest is on Zee5’s reality show Lockdown, where she is working with powerhouse singer Kailash Kher. But here is the thing: part PR campaign or not, no one knows anything else about what the duo is working on or what it would sound like. She has put up photos and the occasional video from shooting with him in Dharamsala in Himachal, but it does not give away more than a possible music video in the works. “I would love to spill all my content online, but I want people to watch the show and see the experience,” she says.

Raja Kumari knows the art of hype. When she jumped from being a songwriter for pop artistes such as Iggy Azalea, Fall Out Boy and Gwen Stefani (as part of music publishing company Pulse) to a solo artiste in her own right, she knew that visual content was important in music. “It’s one thing to listen to the music, but we’re in this day and age where people need to experience it as well. Music videos and content are the best way to understand how you actually see the world. It’s an opportunity to let people into your mind,” she says.

As she likes it

Her way of being on her toes in her social media game? “You just have to keep feeding the beast,” comes the reply. Right from the early engagements in 2016 — with viral internet purveyors Uproxxx and hip-hop publication Complex picking up a branded video profile of her and giving it major attention in the US — Raja Kumari has about 1,00,000 followers on Facebook, about 70,000 on Instagram and another 11,000 on Twitter.

Knowing her reach and regular activity on apps like Instagram, it is no surprise to hear her say she has not “consciously thought about how to beat algorithms”. She adds, “Some people tell me what time of the day to post, but I still post whenever I feel like it.” Even though there have been no snafus that have caused public outcries or had people call her out, she says she will always worry about how people see her in the world. “I think a lot of the projects I’m doing are giving me that cross-promotion.”

People discover her through not just music collaborations, but also through fashion, which is where she is increasingly influential as a proponent of local designers as well as major brands like Puma. She finds her best partner in a New Delhi clothing brand Main (Hindi for ‘I am’) and their ghoonghat hoodies, painted/embroidered denim jackets from Mumbai-based Syrian-American designer Eliza Karaza and more. “One of the goals I had while coming to India was to work with designers here. Through Instagram, I’ve discovered a lot of home-grown talent and I think I’d like to be someone who is known for wearing Indian designers. People from all over the world are looking at me, and I want to make it an opportunity to showcase our talent,” she says.

That’s certainly not a realisation that would have struck her if she was sitting in Los Angeles, churning out music from a studio. Being in India for the last year, Raja Kumari says she will be heading back home to the States in a few months to finish writing songs for her upcoming EP. But she is just about getting started here. She says, “I’ve really committed to the region. You can’t plant seeds and walk away. You really have to water them and be there and make sure they grow properly.”